AP­PLE MAPS HAS COME A LONG WAY IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE

If you’ve been reg­u­larly us­ing Ap­ple Maps over a long pe­riod, you might re­call a time when Ap­ple Maps wasn’t quite what you would call pro­fes­sional in qual­ity. Ap­ple Maps first made its way to pub­lic users in 2012, when it re­placed Google Maps as the de­fault map­ping of­fer­ing on iOS. How­ever, users weren’t en­tirely im­pressed, cit­ing a wide ar­ray of gaps and in­ac­cu­ra­cies in­clud­ing towns and ameni­ties lo­cated in the wrong places, if not omit­ted en­tirely, and cloud-ob­scured satel­lite im­agery.

So ad­verse was the pub­lic re­ac­tion to Ap­ple Maps that Ap­ple CEO Tim Cook apol­o­gized in an on­line-pub­lished open let­ter to cus­tomers and pledged im­prove­ments. For­tu­nately, Ap­ple has in­deed de­liv­ered a raft of en­hance­ments to Ap­ple Maps over the sub­se­quent years, in­clud­ing ex­pan­sions in the real-time traf­fic in­for­ma­tion and nav­i­ga­tion op­tions, as well as the ac­claimed ‘Fly­over’ fea­ture. Fly­over lets users quickly scan pho­to­re­al­is­tic 3D de­pic­tions of ma­jor cities and land­marks.

Af­ter you load up Ap­ple Maps on a de­vice run­ning iOS 12 to­day, it’s es­pe­cially easy to ap­pre­ci­ate how far the soft­ware has im­proved if you zoom in on the San Fran­cisco Bay Area. In a com­pre­hen­sive ar­ti­cle on his web­site, de­signer Justin O’Beirne – a for­mer mem­ber of Ap­ple’s maps divi­sion – has that, de­spite the lim­ited geo­graph­i­cal scope of Ap­ple’s hugely re­vamped new map, this map ac­tu­ally matches or ex­ceeds Google Maps on sev­eral points.